Cauliflower back on schedule

The good news is that cauliflower is back on a 12 hour harvest cycle. For newer players this may not mean much, but there was a time when you could harvest cauliflower twice every day and life was so much easier. Of course in those days L30 and the ruby citadel were the pinnacle of We Rule Success and we lived in tin shacks, went barefoot in the winter, our parents beat us every day and fed us shit for supper and we liked it. Not like kids today who have it easy.

It was nice to have a crop you could harvest twice a day on a regular schedule and not have to look at your watch and wonder if your crops were going to spoil. Then someone at ngmoco:) must have decided they could sell more mojo and set the schedule to 13 hours and 20 minutes, keeping us off-balance for the remainder of the game.

Thanks for giving us twice a day regularity, guys.

And now for what you really want to know

As of Thursday night I was prepared to speculate that this last week was Harry Potter week in We Rule. If they were trying not to be obvious to avoid a law suit, they blew their chances Friday with the Hippogriff and giant spider. In fact the Friday goal and gift releases managed to celebrate episodes 1 to 3.

In case you forgot:

Episode 1: The living chess board.

Episode 2: Aragog the giant spider.

Episode 3: The Hippogriff accused of mauling Draco Malfoy.

Now we can all don our wizard’s caps and cakes, our Harry Potter glasses, grab our wands and sneak our iPhones and iPads into the theater to harvest crops while watching Harry defeat Voldermort once and for all (at least until someone offers Rowling too much money for her to resist yet another installment, which I heard may be happening).

On Tuesday we got a magical abode and the wizard’s prison. I was thinking “Azkaban,” but since I’d never seen Azkaban (a CGI effect they left out of the movies so far—unless it shows up in Harry Potter 7.2, which I shamefully confess I’m waiting for the crowds to clear out to see) I couldn’t say for sure.

By Thursday we could track Harry Potter references for sure. The owlery is where the late Hedwig was raised. The herbology lab is where Snape conducted his nefarious potions. But the giveaway was the stone serpent’s vault with the basilisk. As far as I can tell, the poor basilisk only has one arm, but he’s pretty clearly a basilisk.

I clicked on him to see if he spoke parseltongue, but there was no sound at all. Can you believe it? So I guess we’re stuck with the official online parseltongue translator until the developers fix this grievous error.

If you look closely you’ll see that the basilisk has only one arm. The designers did the same thing to the poor unicorn, left him without one of his hooves. If I were a glass half-full kind of guy, I would say the designers were equal opportunity, giving handicapped characters their shot at the show. I think they simply forgot to save when they were tweaking the 3D models.

So now I want to know: where’s Hogwarts? There has to be a Hogwarts. Maybe that will be next week (although, in my experience, the game designers have the attention span of a three year old). Maybe we will get Hogwarts buildings and Hagrid’s cottage and the evil spider woods.

They don’t have to call the new items those things. They can do it on a wink, wink, nudge nudge basis. But what the hell? They’ve already opened the door to the law suit. We may as well get more Harry Potter in the process.

And if visitors don’t, don’t cry for them

I remember when I was teaching at ACC we closed the visual design labs to hold teacher workshops. We announced the labs would be closed in classes, posted signs that the lab would be closed a week before on all the building’s outer doors, in the lab hall way, in every classroom, and on both lab doors. Big signs too. They were hard too miss.

Students still interrupted the workshops wanting to know why they couldn’t use the damn labs, and were pissed that we hadn’t warned them.

I don’t think people are dumb, but I do think there are a lot of dumb people.

Ellylons525 is hardly the first player to notice that visitors continue to place orders even when the Gone Fishing sign is posted (I made that comment recently). She shut a kingdom down and had to move everything into inventory because people kept ordering even though she had posted the sign.

I did that with We City and We Farm. I didn’t inventory Adventure Bay because, well, you can’t yet (at least not since I last looked a month or two ago,)

ngmoco:) could actually set up a database that you could notify when you’re on vacation. It could post a dialogue saying “This player has (gone fishing)(is on vacation)(is no longer taking your orders.”) It would be nice, but they would probably charge mojo to do so.

I finally came to the conclusion that if players place orders even when your fields are empty and “Gone Fishing” signs are posted in every realm, don’t cry for them. Let their orders spoil. Half will go back and realize they screwed up.

The other half will think it’s your fault and stop ordering altogether. This is a shame if you’re trying to build a customer base, but, believe me, others will show up.

The real irritation is the push notifications that keep popping up, and the solution to that is easy. Go into the iPad or iPhone settings, find “Notifications” and turn them off for We Rule.

Indian items

This week’s theme is Indian items for a limited time only. This is also an attempt to get less experienced players who aren’t floating in cash to spend mojo. Don’t fall for it. By the time you have decent cash reserves, the Indian items might be gone, but something equally cool will be available.

Yet another floater from the ngmoco:) design team. She should at least sing half the duet from Lakme, wouldn’t you think?

Plus, ngmoco:) recycles discontinued items as gifts, or special sales. So if you miss the Indian temple this week, you’ll probably see it again. I suspect that every Halloween and Christmas item from last year will return.

We will also see brand new Halloween and Christmas items because ngmoco:) doesn’t want those of us who have the old ones in inventory to recycle old items back into our realms.

It’s been a slow week in We Rule, at least for me. At least as far as the game went. I spent a hell of a long time cataloguing the numbers for all the new Camelot items, including the twilight meadows with the tiny purple unicorn. By the time Friday rolled around I hoped they were done with Camelot because I do have other blogs to write.

Let’s see, we got:

Knight’s round table with King Arthur, who’s not going to be happy he has to take down the monkey king to rule your realms (or you could inventory the throne to make room for Arthur).

The training gourds with Lancelot, who speaks French and won’t find Guinevere because ngmoco:) left her out (much to Arthur’s relief).

The green knight’s chair, which may or may not have a green knight. You can earn one as a goal or just spend cash or mojo. If you’re way down the levels, it’s worth finishing the goal, but there are better shops for players at higher levels who can afford the coins.

Merlin’s keep is pretty cool, although it doesn’t return much for anybody. It hovers in midair with water spilling (inspired by the floating beer tap sculptures you could buy at the Cracker Barrel restaurants a few years back).

This is one version the magic floating beer tap gag. You can find this on the web for $20. I remember Carol having to pull me away from it forcibly every time we went to the Cracker BarrelIt’s clearly the inspiration for Merlin’s Keep.

Moganna’s keep, which is a butt-ugly tree with glowing limbs. It looks like one of those Disney World exhibits that sends little kids home with nightmares.

The white and dark knight tents, which come as boosted gifts. If you don’t see your knights at first, move the tents. The white knight likes to hide inside.

Click image to see full size

These are the new cabañas, I mean, knight’s tents. I had to move them for both knights to show up. They take up almost no space at all, but I’m not sure they’re worth the mojo boost. Consider them an extreme luxury option.

We Rule purists should be thrilled. Camelot items fit in far more with the original game motif than steam punk buildings, taxidermy shops and romantic bistros. Not to mention Greek gods. (Norse gods, okay. The vikings did invade Britain and displace the tribes who are attributed to starting the legends of King Arthur).

Behind on goals

I finally collected my 20 twilight flowers to finish the twilight meadow goal, only to discover I couldn’t finish a goal twice. (I spent the mojo so I could run the numbers, about 5000 cp over 50 hours. You can check the idle income charts for the exact return.) Carol is just got her 20 flowers and still hasn’t received her twilight meadow. The goal is done, but we both looked through her inventory and no meadows.

Which means no unicorn (the only reason Carol wanted the damn thing to start with).

Still crashing

I noticed We Rule is beginning to crash on launch again. I couldn’t even get it open tonight. Maybe they should beta test these new goals and items more.

Magic grapes

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a magic crop that matches the groves’ six hour harvest schedule? I can think of one. Grapes. I would really really like to see some magic grapes in the magic crops list, and I bet other players might too.

It would be nice if players could trade items (We Rule EBay) so that players who boosted their gift cart and ended up with six can trade with players who missed. Maybe if players spent mojo to make a trade ngmoco:) would actually consider it.

This weekend was a good example. A number of players boosted gifts to get the twilight flowers for the twilight meadow quest only to end up with more of the same trinkets they already had and no twilight flowers.

(Seriously, if you want the meadow and its purple unicorn, just spend the 50 mojo on the goal rather than blow it on a useless hunt through boosted gifts. And at the rate they’re giving out twilight flowers, you may not get twenty.)

Think it through. Make sure you want to spend 50 mojo on this building that’s slightly bigger than the caterpillar perch. I won’t know what it returns as idle income (50 hours delivery time) until sometime today.

Click image to see full size

This unicorn may look large on the splash screen but he’d no bigger than the other one. Hopefully you can hold off and buy it on we Bay in a month or two.

Consider this inventory: 11 wedding chapels, 14 shipwrecks, 23 naval ships, 16 blue Venetian palazzos and eight Machu Piccus. What could we possibly do with all that inventory? What could a player possibly do with that?

Trade it and sell it on we-Bay. I propose that ngmoco:) (after they fix the bugs) add a third tab to the news/realms tab that launches the we-Bay site. There players can sell used inventory, and players looking for better deals can bid on it.

So let’s say I somehow ended up with six golden red dragons. I could take bids on four of them. The four best bids win. Or I could offer a direct-sale price of 400000c. I could clean out my Machu Piccu extras (they’re so big and no one needs more than one) for best offer above 20000c.

Did you install seven houses of worship and now only need one? Rather than sell them for 10 percent, why not see what you can get on we-Bay? The seller enters the item under her username and the buyer bids with his.

What does ngmoco:) get out of this? What do they always get out of it. They can charge 2 mojo for every transaction. Knowing ngmoco:), (and I might as well say this because they’ll come up with it on their own) they would charge 10m to buy 20 bids as well. Or 100 bids for 40m.

This means, as we all know, more players buy mojo so they can trade on we-Bay. If ngmoco:) can get a second-hand items market going (either in-app or online) they could pass Pages as the number one grossing app of all time.

If ngmoco:) does create we-Bay, of course, or anything remotely resembling it, I want the 10 percent of every mojo spent making trades credited to my account (better yet, the cash equivalent). 1 It was my idea, after all, and my readers were my witnesses. And Carol’s been pestering me to start making money on this blog.

1Call my lawyer, ngmoco:). He’s my brother in law and his specialty is real estate so you’ll probably do better than you would with a contracts specialist.back